Thanks to everyone who helped out with the extensive alpha and beta releases with all the bug reports, crash log submissions, and general feedback. It has all been a tremendous help in creating the best paint.net release ever! It’s been a long time coming, but I think it’s worth it.

There are a few ways to get the new version:

The preferred way: If you’re using Paint.NET v3.5.x, go to the Utilities menu and click on “Check for Updates.” If you’re using a pre-release version of 4.0 (beta or release candidate), go to the Settings dialog, then to the Updates section, and then click “Check Now.”

You can also download it directly from the website, http://www.getpaint.net/ . There is no need to uninstall the old version: that will be taken care of automatically.

Without further ado, here is the final list of changes, features, improvements, and fixes:

System Requirements

Windows 7 SP1 or newer is now required.

.NET Framework 4.5 is now required, and will be installed if needed.

A dual-core (or more!) processor is highly recommended.

Hardware acceleration (GPU) via Direct2D is now supported.

Please disable this in the Settings dialog if you experience visual artifacts.

Performance

A brand new, asynchronous, fully multithreaded rendering engine allows performance to scale very well with respect to the number of CPU cores whether you have 2, 4, 6, or even 16 of them.

The responsiveness of the user interface has been greatly improved, especially when working with large images.

Memory usage is lower.

Improved battery life impact due to fixing the way the floating windows manage their transparency.

Selections are now antialiased, which greatly improves the quality around the edges of selected content. You can turn this on and off at any time from the toolbar.

Everything related to selections now has much higher performance and greatly reduced CPU usage, especially if hardware acceleration (GPU) is enabled.

The selection outline is now rendered using the “dancing ants” animation, which greatly improves the contrast between it and the image itself.

General

The functionality previously provided by the Utilities, Window, and Help menus has been simplified, consolidated, and moved to the top-right corner of the main window.

The image thumbnail list has been moved up 1 row so that it no longer intrudes into the current Tool’s toolbar space. This means it will no longer “jump around” when you switch between tools. This also means that it is aligned to the top of the monitor when the main window is maximized, making it easier to click on images (Fitt’s law).

The image thumbnail list can now be reordered with drag-and-drop.

A brand new Settings dialog makes it much easier to configure all the tool and toolbar defaults, among other things.

The zoom slider and units selector have been moved from the toolbar to the bottom right corner of the window (into the status bar).

Each image now shows up as its own taskbar item. This can be disabled in the Settings dialog with “Show image previews in the Windows taskbar.”

Layers can now be reordered with drag-and-drop.

Ctrl+Click on the Move Layer Up/Down buttons will now move a layer to the top/bottom, respectively.

Improved quality of Image->Resize.

Edit –> Copy Merged will copy all layers to the clipboard without having to use Image->Flatten first.

Copying to the clipboard now includes the “PNG” format, which allows transparency to survive from many popular applications (e.g. Office)

You can now use the middle mouse button to scroll/pan the image at any time (same functionality as holding down the spacebar along with clicking and dragging the mouse).

Shift+Backspace will now fill the selection with the secondary color (Backspace, the shortcut key for Edit -> Fill Selection, still fills with primary color as usual).

paint.net now shows up in Windows’ “Default Programs” control panel so you can configure its file type associations without reinstalling.

EXIF rotation metadata is now applied when opening images (e.g. JPG taken with a rotated camera).

Crash logs are now stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\paint.net\CrashLogs (e.g. C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\paint.net\CrashLogs) instead of on the desktop.

Effects

New effect: Photo -> Vignette.

Improved the quality of the Photo -> Red Eye Removal effect.

Improved UI for Layers -> Rotate/Zoom.

Effect plugins now show up with a jigsaw puzzle icon next to them in the menus. You can hover over the effect to see information about it, including the author and location of its DLL.

Errors while loading effect plugins are now displayed in the Settings dialog.

Tools

Most Tools now support “fine-grained history.” You may adjust the properties of what you’ve drawn (e.g. colors, toolbar settings) before committing to the layer (use the “Finish” button or press Enter), and each change is tracked in the history.

Tools may now draw directly with a blending mode, configurable from the toolbar. All of the layer blending modes are supported, as well as “Overwrite.”

Brush tools (Paintbrush, Eraser, Clone Stamp, Recolor) now have soft brushes support via a “Hardness” setting in the toolbar.

The Move tools (Move Selected Pixels, Move Selection) have a much better UI for scaling, moving, and (especially) rotation.

The Move tools now support moving the rotation anchor, which changes the center of rotation.

The new Shapes tool replaces the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, and Freeform shape tools. 27 shapes are currently available. You may move, resize, and rotate a shape, as well as reconfigure any other properties from the toolbar (color, outline size, etc.) before committing it to the layer.

Color Picker has a configurable sampling radius, and can sample from either the current layer or the whole image.

Gradient tool now supports a new Spiral gradient type and allows configuration of the repeat mode (none, repeat, wrapped).

Gradient tool has improved rendering quality via dithering and antialiasing. You can control both of these with the standard antialiasing toggle in the toolbar.

Magic Wand and Paint Bucket now allow live adjustment of Tolerance and the Origin (click location) after clicking (press Enter to commit/finish).

Magic Wand and Paint Bucket can now sample from either the current layer or the whole image.

Paint Bucket tool now supports anti-aliasing.

Recolor tool can now use the color of the pixel where you click as the color to be replaced. Or, as usual, it can use the secondary color.

CCleaner - also known as Crap Cleaner - is a disk cleanup utility that goes beyond the scope of the built in Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Featuring the ability to clean up temporary files, browser history and cache, the Recycle Bin, along with Windows applications that you install. There is also a registry cleaner, uninstall helper, startup manager, System Restore manager and disk wiper. You can choose to have your data cleaned with a single pass or range up to the Gutmann 35 pass data cleaning sequence. There's even a cookie manager and free space wiper. One of the great things about CCleaner is that it automates all of these cleanings so you don't have to hunt down these files and generally can take mere seconds to run.

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is a full-blown anti-malware program that has recently left the labs and can be considered the next step in the detection and removal of malware. Malwarebytes Team put together a host of new technologies that were specially designed to quickly detect, deter and destroy any malware that could reside in your computer.

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware monitors every process and actually stops malicious processes before they even start. It uses an impressive technology that is in fact a completely novel way of heuristic scanning and it is the teams response to the increasingly complex malware threats. And, as they did with Malwarebytes' RogueRemover we also have added a threats center. You can simply check online which pests are removed the most and thus are the most prevalent.

Process Explorer is much like the Task Manager found in Windows but far more comprehensive. Every process can be identified by signature verification. If you don't recognize a running process there is a feature to search for the process online through select search engines. There are options to highlight new objects, deleted objects (processes terminated), services, your running processes, packed images, jobs, relocated DLL files, and .NET processes all in their own customizable colors. Process Explorer is a very useful tool for looking at the running objects on your computer. There is also an option to replace the existing Task Manager with Process Explorer.

foobar2000 is a comprehensive, easy to use audio player for Windows. Featuring full Unicode support, advanced tagging capabilities, customizable hotkeys, ReplayGain to help correct your audio and many more useful utilities to assist your media library. There are multiple ways to configure and customize your user interface. foobar's developer also includes an open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

foobar2000 allows you to easily use multiple playlists and utilize features to remove both duplicates and dead items. foobar handles multiple popular audio formats, including: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, and CDDA without the need for plugins to play all of those formats.There are also features to support viewing album art, browsing your media library, having visualizations and configuring the equalizer.

CCleaner - also known as Crap Cleaner - is a disk cleanup utility that goes beyond the scope of the built in Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Featuring the ability to clean up temporary files, browser history and cache, the Recycle Bin, along with Windows applications that you install. There is also a registry cleaner, uninstall helper, startup manager, System Restore manager and disk wiper. You can choose to have your data cleaned with a single pass or range up to the Gutmann 35 pass data cleaning sequence. There's even a cookie manager and free space wiper. One of the great things about CCleaner is that it automates all of these cleanings so you don't have to hunt down these files and generally can take mere seconds to run.